Maternal and child health disparities in infant mortality, preterm birth, and access to health care persist as important problems in North Carolina, and disproportionately affect people in the predominantly rural Eastern part of the state. The investigations proposed build upon a five-year collaboration among the Eastern NC Baby Love Plus Consortium, the UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, and the UNC Department of Maternal and Child Health. We propose to increase research and intervention capacity toward understanding and eliminating health disparities in rural North Carolina by developing a community-linked collaboration, and by implementing pilot studies aimed at understanding community influences on maternal, infant, and child health. In this proposal, the collaborative research planning process and its successful implementation are given equal weight in achieving our goals. The formative process includes the development of unique training opportunities for the community partners and other minority investigators to improve community infrastructure for conducting health disparity research and intervention. The process will also provide opportunities for University investigators to increase their networks and competence to work in rural NC communities. Suggested pilot studies aim to formulate collaborative research questions with the community that can be answered through current data collection efforts of the Baby Love Plus Evaluation, and to utilize geographic information systems to explore community socio-environmental context. Ultimately, we present a process for a reasonably paced, systematic development of a full-scale community-partnered multi-level research project.